I’ve asked Ian Dickerson, the author of the following book to tell us more about it. He’s most graciously agreed:

IAN DICKERSON – Who Is The Falcon?: The Detective In Print, Movies, Radio and TV. Purview Press. softcover, December 2016.

Back in the dim and distant past, when I was just a lad, I discovered the adventures of the Saint. (I know, I know, I’ve kept that quiet….) In those heady days I was a sucker for any new Saint-like adventure so when the BBC ran out of old black and white Saint films to show and moved onto something called ‘The Falcon.’ my place in front of the television was assured for a few more weeks.

Those early Falcon films were remarkably Saintly, and although the later ones got a little more creative — The Falcon and the Co-Eds anyone? — they were still firmly in the gentleman detective genre and my teen -aged self was happy.

Fast forward a few years — well, okay, quite a few years — and I discovered old time radio shows. But I soon had a problem, I had all the episodes of The Saint on tape and being greedy I wanted more. Then I discovered the Falcon had also appeared on radio! Aha, problem solved I thought! But when I listened to the tapes I discovered the Falcon — that radio Falcon — was a hard boiled 1940s PI and bore virtually no resemblance to the gentleman detective of the George Sanders and Tom Conway films. At a time when the Internet was only really just booting up, I had no way of establishing what had happened, but I rather enjoyed those hard-boiled PI adventures so quickly ordered some more.

Fast forward a few more years and with the help of the now mature Internet, I discovered that not only had the Falcon also appeared in books, magazines and on TV, but that the radio show had run for over a decade and there had been over four hundred and eighty episodes.

I wanted to learn things; to find out why there were two different characters and how they’d come to be changed, to find out more about the Falcon’s TV adventures and see if I could find copies of them, I also wanted to know more about his stint on radio — who played him? Who wrote the stories? What were they about? And for the geek in me … had I listened to all the ones that were available? (I certainly have now!)

And I wanted to celebrate a character that had survived sixteen films, a handful of books, thirty-nine episodes of television and that long run on radio.

So I wrote a book.

Who is the Falcon? tells the story of all the Falcon’s adventures in print, on radio, in film and television. And there’s even a Falcon short story from the 1940s thrown in for good measure.

16 Responses to “Book Noted: IAN DICKERSON – Who Is The Falcon?: The Detective In Print, Movies, Radio and TV.”

Ian Dickerson’s book is also a darned good read! The filmography, radio and television episode guides belong among your reference books if you have any interest in this sort of lore. It is unlikely that anyone will need to look elsewhere.

The Falcon films do not sustain well on repeated viewings, but are great fun once around the block. An aside: Why is he called The Falcon? No one knows, but had he been called the Golden Retriever, you could actually bring one into your home.

David,
Thanks for your input, but I knew those things, and have actually read Michael Arlen’s story, Gay Falcon. If that is his name, so be it. But in the films, it is not, as you pointed out, his name. Calling him The Falcon, though kind of cool, makes as much sense as calling him The Kangaroo.

Drexel Drake’s Falcon adopted his nickname whilst on a train journey from Cambridge to London, inspired by a falconer “The falcon, powerful of wing and indomitable of courage, takes its quarry as it moves, plunging down upon it from above.”

Yes, thanks for the true story behind the Falcon’s name, Ian. Falcons strike more fear in the hearts of wrongdoers than a kangaroo, that’s for sure!

PS. Sorry I haven’t been as much up to date on the comments as I should have been the last couple of weeks or so. Too much time getting my laptop up and running again after having had to replace the hard drive. The transplant’s been done, now the implementation of all the associated hardware.